Archive for Apartheid

British Paymaster General wants to send young English people to unemployment boot camps

Matt Hancock, the British Paymaster General, wants to put unemployed young English people through a three week intensive programme he describes as a “boot camp” at job centres or they will lose their benefits.

The “boot camp” would be mandatory for all 18-21 year olds in England and would run to 71 hours of training on interviews and job searching.

The principal behind this – that people on benefits should be doing everything possible to find a job and not be stuck at home in front of the telly watching Jeremy Kyle – is a sound one but as usual, the British government have taken a good idea and come up with a crap implementation.

Only English youngsters would have to go to this “boot camp” in exchange for their benefits – unemployed Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people will continue to get their benefits without having to attend a “boot camp” and English people moving over the border will be similarly exempt. What happens with Scottish and Welsh youngsters who are already claiming unemployment benefits and move to England will no doubt be as vague and unenforceable as the requirement that 16-18 year olds in England be in formal education which isn’t enforced against Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish youngsters who move here. And why is it only young people being targeted? It’s harder for a young person with little or no work experience to get a job than an adult who has a proven record and experience that you can’t teach in a classroom yet it is young people who are targeted by these schemes with the implication being that they are just workshy.

Not only is this scheme racist but it is ageist as well.

Everyone claiming unemployment benefits, regardless of their age, should be required to spend the working day looking for work, doing community service and getting an education and they should be supervised doing so. In some parts of the country and for some sections of society it’s not easy to get a job but that doesn’t mean that their day shouldn’t be spent productively. Councils are cutting back on public services to save money while the taxpayer is spending billions paying people not to work. If all unemployed people were carrying out community service we wouldn’t have filthy streets, fly tipping and graffiti everywhere and councils saying they can’t provide services because they can’t afford them.

There is a workforce of 1.85m people currently being paid not to work by those who are working. Let’s not stigmatise young people or get hung up on the irrelevant question of why people are out of work and just get them doing something useful for their local community until they find a job. And that applies to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish as well – the English are paying for their benefits so why shouldn’t we attach some conditions?

Matt Hancock MP

British sickness tax goes up in England today

It’s April Fool’s Day today and you all know what that means … that’s right, the British are taking us for fools yet again with the prescription charge in England going up 20p to £8.05 per item.

Whilst the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have all abolished prescriptions charges in their own countries, the British continue to tax the sick in England to help pay for the subsidies that allow the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to get their prescriptions for free.

Just one of the reasons why we need an English Parliament.

UK Prescription Charges 2007-2014

British government increases English prescription charges

UK Prescription Charges 2007-2014 TableThe British Minister for English Health has announced that prescription charges will go up again on April Fool’s Day this year from £7.85 to £8.05 per item and NHS dental costs will go up by up to £5.

But only in England.

Prescriptions are free in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland thanks to the lavish subsidies the British government gives then out of English taxes. These same subsidies have allowed the rest of the UK to variously abolish hospital parking charges, abolish means testing for social care, freeze council tax, reduce or abolish university tuition fees and much more whilst we in England continue to pay more and more every year.

Just one of the reasons why we need an English Parliament.

UK Prescription Charges 2007-2014

Wales to get tax raising powers

St George is Cross

The British government is planning to give the Welsh government the same powers to vary income tax as the Scottish government and control over landfill tax and stamp duty.

David Cameron said:

Today we are announcing more power for the Welsh people and the Welsh government. Power that’s about building this country up, power that’s about making sure we have real accountable government here in Wales.

The English people still have no government and no power. There is no accountable government here in England, just an unaccountable British government full of politicians that can’t be held to account at the ballot box by a single person in England making decisions affecting the lives of English people.

He then went on to announce that the 2014 NATO summit will be held in Wales:

Scotland has got the Commonwealth Games, London had the Olympics, Northern Ireland the G8, now it’s Wales’ turn.

The Olympics were the British Olympics, nothing to do with England. The whole thing was about the British so when is it England’s turn?

The Welsh First Minister doesn’t want devolution of income tax until the Barnett Bribe is reformed to provide “fairer” funding for Wales (by which he means more English money being given to Wales):

Today is an important day for Wales. We are now being treated like equals in the UK.

We are not in favour of devolution of income tax until the Barnett formula is reformed to provide fairer funding for Wales.

Treated like equals in the UK?  Being treated the same as the English is hardly something to aspire to: the only nation in Europe with no government of its own, northing more than a source of income for the British government to fund its spending addiction.

The Nationality Lottery strikes again

Cross-posted from English Commonwealth

The Nationality Lottery: It probably won't be you

It’s a well known fact that the British government distributes our taxes unfairly, subsidising Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland at England’s expense but that sort of thing wouldn’t happen with charity would it?  The answer, of course, is yes.

Figures released by the Big Lottery Fund show that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receive significantly more funding than England – as much as three times more if you live in Northern Ireland.

The average lottery funding per head in England is just £9.46 compared to £13.49 in Wales, £25.27 in Scotland and £31.33 per head in Northern Ireland.  There is a Big Lottery budget for the UK as a whole as well but no figures have been released for this fund so it’s not currently possible to tell whether this disparity is replicated in the UK-wide budget.

A spokesperson for the Big Lottery Fund has tried to justify spending so much more on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by saying that grants are given based on population and deprivation.  England’s population is 5 times that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined and parts of England are the most deprived in the whole UK but England received just a third of the funding Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland got.  They also cite a one-off award for £49m to the Life Changes Trust as a reason for the disparity in funding this year but previous years’ figures show that England has always received less funding per head that the rest of the UK.

Some will no doubt point to the money the British government took from the lottery to pay for the London Olympics and claim that it was lottery money given to England but the Olympics weren’t English and the lottery money has to be paid back (eventually) by a corporation owned by the Mayor of London.  It was an expropriation of Lottery funds by the British government, not a grant by the Big Lottery Fund.

The Big Lottery isn’t the only charity to unfairly allocate extra funding to the other member states of the UK.  The Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal diverts funding to Scotland whilst allowing Poppyscotland, who it merged with, to keep all the money it raises for itself, for example.  There are many other charities that have Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and British arms but that’s a topic for future discussion.

Michael Fabricant wants discrimination against English in the constitution

Tory MP Michael Fabricant has called for a new Act of Union to establish the principal of institutional discrimination against England in constitutional law.

Vote For Change - England Need Not ApplyFabricant wants a new Act of Union which will ban British MPs elected in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from voting on devolved matters in England, only allowing British MPs elected in England to vote on them.  This would make an English Parliament unconstitutional, explicitly denying equal rights for the people of England.

Mark Wallace, the executive editor of Conservative Home, has written an article Michael Fabricant is right, we must give political equality to England in which he explains how England shouldn’t be given equality by refusing to create an English Parliament with the same powers as the Scottish Parliament but should instead settle for the unworkable fudge that is English Votes on English Laws (EVoEL).

Wallace (who claims to be an avowed libertarian) is typical of the British nationalist Tories – opinion polls show that a majority of people want an English Parliament but because that’s not the Tory way of thinking it has to be opposed.  That’s certainly not libertarian thinking.

British government gives 11% of English EU funding to Scotland, Wales & NI

When David Cameron secured his “historic” reduction of the increase in the EU budget it was on the condition that the UK ended up paying more whilst everyone else’s bill went down.

Thief

One of the mechanisms for making us pay more was a reduction in the amount of our money the EU gives us back as structural funding.  Predictably, the British government has found a way to make England feel a disproportionate amount of the pain of the increased membership costs of being in the EU by skimming 11% off the money allocated in the EU budget to England and sharing it out between Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to cushion them from the effects of the reduced structural funding.  As the only net contributor to the British Treasury, England is already responsible for paying a disproportionate amount of the cost of being in the EU making it doubly unfair for the hard working English taxpayer.

The Local Government Association have criticised the plans to deprive England of desperately needed structural funding and have predictably called for “devolution” of power and funding to local authorities.  The LGA is just one of the organisations that respond to the discrimination against the English with calls for the balkanisation of England and local government reorganisation as a weak and ineffectual English equivalent to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies.

This is yet more proof that the English just can’t trust the British to protect their interests or even just treat them fairly.  We need an English Parliament now more than ever.

McKay Commission fails to answer West Lothian Question

The McKay Commission on the West Lothian Question has reported today with the conclusion that not addressing the West Lothian Question is unsustainable and that nothing should be changed to address the West Lothian Question.

Sir William McKay

British government puts Scot in charge of commission deciding whether Scots should vote on English laws

The report says that English-only legislation should be supported by a majority of British MPs representing constituencies in England and that they should pass a resolution saying that they’re not going to do it again.

And that’s it – no ban on British MPs from constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from voting on laws that are devolved in their own country, nothing to prevent a repeat of the shameful way Scottish MPs voted through foundation hospitals and university tuition fees for England.  The procedures of the British House of Commons “should be changes to encourage MPs to follow this approach” (my emphasis).

The report says that instead of requiring a majority of MPs representing constituencies in England to pass a bill affecting England only, they should just publish the voting record of MPs representing constituencies in England alongside the final result.

If a government was seen to have failed to attract the support of a majority of MPs from England [or England and Wales] for business affecting those interests, it would be likely to sustain severe political damage.

This is pie in the sky stuff from the Scotsman the Brits ironically put in charge of this English commission.  It was well publicised at the time and has continued to be well publicised that it was British MPs elected in Scotland who imposed tuition fees on English students yet despite all the campaigns and violent protests about them being introduced (and then tripled) there has been no mention of this fact by the campaigners, protesters or the media.  In fact, the executive summary of the report also fails to mention these votes, raising the prospect of it happening but then dismissing it by pointing out that the party with a majority in the British Parliament has only had a minority in England twice which is completely irrelevant.

Specifically it raises the possibility that a majority opinion among MPs from England on such laws could be outvoted by a UK-wide majority of all UK MPs. But it is extremely rare for this to happen. Since 1919, only in the short-lived parliaments of 1964–66 and February–October 1974 has the party or coalition forming the UK Government not also enjoyed a majority in England.

The report recognises that “people in England are unhappy about the existing arrangements and support change” but ignores – by cherry picking the surveys it quotes – the fact that the majority of that support for change is for an English Parliament.  It goes on to say that British MPs representing constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should not be banned from voting on English matters because that “would create two different classes of MP” completely missing the point that there are already two different classes of MP – those who can vote on domestic affairs in their own constituency and those who can’t, those who can vote on laws for another country where the people affected can’t hold them to account and those who can be held to account by every voter their decisions affect.

The commission report says that the democratic deficit in England as a result of the botched devolution deal that left England out is accidental:

In the absence of change in the way the House of Commons works, the consequence – clearly unintended, but nonetheless important – may be to impede the voicing of any distinctively English concerns, or perceived concerns, that exist on wholly or mainly English matters.

I don’t believe for a moment that the way England is treated as a British colony is accidental and the refusal of the British government to release the minutes of the 1997 Cabinet meetings on devolution makes me all the more suspicious.  The spurious excuse for withholding the minutes is that it would undermine the principle of collective decision making but last week Margaret Thatcher’s papers from the Falklands war were published which showed that Ken Clarke – a current member of the Cabinet – opposed kicking the Argentinians out of the Falklands and favoured collaboration with them instead.  If those papers don’t undermine the principle of collective decision making then what does?

McKay and his researchers make it very clear that they have sought opinions from all parts of the UK on how England should be government:

Any reforms undertaken to respond to English concerns must therefore be mindful of possible impacts outside England and seek to mitigate such impacts.

In 1997, however, nobody in England was asked for an opinion on how Scotland and Wales should be governed.  We weren’t even asked for an opinion on how England should be government and we’ve been refused the right to voice our opinion on it ever since.

The report dismisses an English Parliament within a British federation out of hand, claiming that “the great majority of evidence submitted to [them] was, however, set firmly against the idea of an English Parliament”.  This “evidence” was:

There are no precedents of federal systems in which one component makes up over five-sixths of the overall population of a state. There is a wide view that such a big unit would destabilise the state as a whole, both in relation to the three much smaller units in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but also in relation to the federal UK parliament and government, to which an English parliament would be likely to be a powerful rival.

While there is no precedent of a federal system with one constituent part comprising 80% of the population working, there is no precedent of it not working.  There is evidence of discrimination or poor treatment of a native population bringing down entire empires though so the commission is shown to be very selective in what “evidence” it considers.

The argument that an English Parliament would somehow dominate a federal British government is a nonsense – in a federal structure the English Parliament would be concerned only with English domestic affairs, the same as the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Northern Irish Assembly are now.  If a reserved matter was of such specific national interest that the English Parliament and one or more of the other national parliaments were at loggerheads over it then it is clearly something that should be devolved anyway.

Any federal system requires a delineation of competences, which are usually arbitrated by a supreme court that would be able to overrule the UK parliament, as well as binding the devolved institutions. This would be a radical departure from UK constitutional practice. In this and in other respects, the “massive upheaval in governmental arrangements that would be needed to create a new Parliament for 50 million people” would not appear a proportionate response to the current sense of disadvantage in England.

I fail to see the problem with a constitutional court and in fact proposed this as part of my case for a British confederation – a solution that the McKay commission didn’t consider.  The British government (and devolved governments) should be bound by the law.  Changing the law to legitimise breaking the law is clearly wrong and a constitutional court should be able to bind a government in its judgements.  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Nobody and that’s why our politicians have been able to lie, cheat and thieve their way through their political careers with relative impunity.  A constitutional court is an eminently sensible suggestion.

Whether the creation of an English Parliament is considered by politicians and academics to be “proportionate” or not is irrelevant.  It is an integral part of the only two workable solutions to the democratic deficit experienced in England that maintains a British union and is what most polls show that most people in England want.

It seems unlikely in the current climate that citizens would favour having more politicians than now, or the costs associated with establishing a new institution.

The “more politicians, more cost” argument about an English Parliament is so discredited that it really shouldn’t have made it into this report containing “expert” evidence and opinion at all.  The vast majority of legislation currently passed by the British government is either English-only legislation now or would be under a federal system of government.  There is no need for over 650 British MPs with most of their work being the responsibility of another government.  Simply taking the number of British MPs representing constituencies in England and applying that number to a devolved English Parliament and redistributing the difference would result in no net increase in politicians but by being a bit more ambitious, the total number of politicians in the British and English parliaments could easily be decreased.

The cost is also a non-argument.  Former Tory MP, Chris Gill, wrote a paper on creating a British federation when he was still an MP.  The paper proposed turning the House of Commons into an English Parliament and the House of Lords into a federal British Parliament and found that in today’s money, it would save almost half a billion a year.

The report touches on cross-border effects of English legislation and uses that as a reason not to ban British MPs representing constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from voting on English laws.  It fails to examine the existing example of the Scottish government being given jurisdiction over sections of the River Tweed in England and its English tributaries which means English people accused of unauthorised fishing on an English river can be summoned to appear before a Scottish Sheriff in a Scottish court to be tried under Scottish law.

Cross-border effects of English legislation under the British government are also not fully explored.  The requirement of all young English people to remain in education until the age of 18 is a perfect example – the British government has passed this law without considering the cross-border effects resulting in there still being unanswered questions as to how people moving from England before finishing their post-16 education will continue to be educated in Scotland and Wales or if Scottish people will be exempted from post-16 education despite the fact that it comes into force this September.

EU legislation is given a brief mention, pointing out that it is applied differently to England than it is in Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland and that there is no differentiation between English and British interests.  The report fails to point out that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own representation to the EU.

So, that’s the report in all it’s inglorious mediocrity but what’s wrong with the proposal itself?  The proposals put forward by the report won’t actually change change anything in any material way.  The standing orders for committees might change but that’s just a framework.  Most English people have little interest in how these committees are formed, they’re bothered about the fact that British MPs representing constituencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland get to vote on English laws and sometimes get to overrule the wishes of the majority of British MPs representing constituencies in England.  The McKay commission’s proposals don’t address this at all.  It isn’t even the unworkable “English Votes on English Laws” constitutional fudge, it’s a fudge of that fudge and a waste of everyone’s time, money and effort.

There are only three workable solutions to the democratic deficit experienced by England in the British union.  The first option and the one that causes the least constitutional upheaval is a federal structure which sees England given a devolved English Parliament with at least the same powers as the Scottish Parliament.  The second option is a more ambitious constitutional change, creating a British confederation.  The third option is English independence.  English Votes on English Laws and any of the variants proposed now or in the past just can’t be made to work.  A politician can’t exclusively represent British interests one day and exclusively represent English interests the next.  English laws need to be proposed, amended and voted on by politicians elected in England to represent English interests in an English government.  English Votes on English Laws would give us British politicians elected in England to represent British interests in the British government making British laws for England.  It would be an unworkable mess.

The unwritten brief of the McKay commission was to come up with a way of maintaining the status quo whilst appearing to be addressing the concerns of English people about who gets to make English laws.  In this respect, the commission has successfully met its objectives and the British government now has an “independent” report telling them that the answer to the West Lothian Question is to con English people into thinking that they’re doing something about it whilst doing absolutely nothing to address it.

University admissions continue to decline in England

Last month the SNP reported that university admissions in 2012 were up in Scotland and down in England.

Could you pass the 11+?The reason is obvious: the decline in admissions in England started when the British government’s racist tuition fees were tripled.

I don’t have a problem with less people going to university – in fact, I positively welcome it.  The policy of the last Labour government to have 50% of school leavers in England going to university was absolutely mental and if it was ever achieved, would have made degrees utterly worthless.  Only the academically gifted should go to university.  A degree is a sign of superior academic prowess, it shouldn’t be as commonplace as a NVQ or an A-Level.  If 50% of people had a degree what would you have to do to set yourself apart from the other half of the job seeking population that had the same level of qualification as you?  The A-Level would be the new GCSE, the bachelors degree the new A-Level and the masters degree would be the new bachelors.  School leavers wouldn’t be leaving education and becoming productive members of society until they were at least 26 or 26 and £60k in debt.

That said, the tuition fees system is clearly damaging higher education in England and forcing gifted and talented youngsters to abandon their studies prematurely.  A return not just to nationwide academic selection but proper implementation of the abortive tripartite system started in the 1940’s and a return of free university tuition is the best possible education system we can give English youngsters.  We can pay for this by not subsidising free university education in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for them and anyone else from the EU who decides to study there.

Oxford University offering £22k bribe to Scottish students

Oxford UniversityThe English have been victims of institutional discrimination at the hands of the British establishment for years – elderly people have to go half blind before they can be treated for ARMD, cancer victims are refused life saving medication because there’s not enough of our money left to pay for it after it’s been “redistributed”, the price of prescriptions goes up in England every year but nobody in Scotland, Wales or NI pay for theirs  – but just once in a while something so blatantly wrong comes along to remind us that discriminating against the English is an integral part of the British psyche.

The British government first imposed university tuition fees on the English in 2003 thanks to the votes of British MPs elected in Scotland despite the tuition fees bill not applying to Scotland.  The British voted again last year to increase tuition fees in England to a maximum of £9k a year.  A university education is free in Scotland, costs a maximum of £6k in Northern Ireland and £3k in Wales.  Students from EU countries have to get the same treatment as residents of the country they’re studying in unless that EU country is England when they’ll have to pay up to £9k a year, just like they would if they studied in England.

This is all old news of course: this particular piece of racial discrimination has been going on for almost a decade now.  What is new is that Oxford University wants to recruit more Scottish students and is offering bungs of up to £22k to encourage Scottish people to come down and study there.  There is no financial incentive for English people to study there, just £9k a year in tuition fees.

How did we end up with a society where discriminating against English people isn’t just tolerated but actively encouraged?

Slavery hypocrisy

I saw a Facebook comment this morning from a local Labour councillor criticising the use of unemployed people bussed in to the centre of London to marshal the Jubilee concert.  This is “slavery” and of course, all down to the evil Tories.

I actually have some time for this councillor who, despite his politics mostly being fundamentally wrong to me, is doing a reasonable job in trying circumstances but this was a bit hypocritical really because I remember writing something a couple of years ago – April 2009 to be precise – about Gordon Brown proposing to force English children to do 50 hours of community service, threatening exam failure for those that refused.

There is nothing wrong with unemployed people doing community service and I’ve previously written various pieces on why unemployed people should be made to work in exchange for their benefits.  As it happens, the people the aforementioned councillor was referring to weren’t treated particularly well but that doesn’t make the principal wrong because it isn’t.  But what is interesting, though, is that forcing adults claiming unemployment benefits to do some community work for the benefit of those paying the benefits is considered to be wrong whilst an MP elected in Scotland proposing to force English children to do community service and threatening them with exam failure for not complying is apparently ok.

Isn’t it interesting how the moral compass is so often guided by the colour of someone’s rosette?

26 week suspended sentence for murdering a baby

A muslim woman has been given a 26 week suspended sentence for murdering her newborn baby because she was worried about her family being dishonoured by her having a child out of wedlock.

Firstly … 26 weeks?  182 days for murdering a baby, going out with her family and then burying it in a garden.  Not just a paltry 26 weeks for murdering a baby, but a suspended sentence – she won’t even go to prison!  It’s obscene and a miscarriage of justice.  She put her family’s standing in the muslim “community” ahead of the life of her own baby and the baby died.  She should be punished properly for murder, not given tea and sympathy and let off with a slapped wrist.  A baby was killed for fuck’s sake and she’s walking around with nothing but an ASBO tag on her ankle (if that) by way of punishment.

The criminal justice system in England is an absolute joke.  A woman gets away with murdering a baby because it’s cultural.  Labour’s Lord Ahmed was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and not only kept his peerage and party membership, but served less half of his outrageously low 12 week prison sentence and looks set to get away relatively lightly with allegedly putting a $10m bounty on the head of Barack Obama and George Bush at a public meeting in Pakistan.  A man was jailed for 70 days for burning a copy of the koran in April last year, a week after a muslim was given a £50 fine for burning poppies outside the Albert Hall on Remembrance Day and shouting “British soldiers burn in hell”.  There is very little justice in the justice system.

Racist fees result in fewer Scottish university applications from England

SCOTTISH universities have received 5,000 fewer applications from students south of the Border wanting to take their degrees in Scotland amid claims that the recession and uncertainty over fees are causing undergraduates to stay closer to home.

That’s the Scotsman’s theory on why Scottish universities are seeing a drop in the number of English students looking to study in Scottish universities.

Nationality LotteryIt’s not the recession or uncertainty over fees that’s the problem, it’s the racial discrimination and high costs.  I appreciate that this will come as a shock to a lot of Scots and the BBC but English people haven’t been going to Scottish universities because they’re better, they’ve been going because the degrees are easier (4 years instead of 3) and because they’re cheaper.  Or they have been until the Scottish government decided to introduce racial discrimination into the Scottish education system by charging English students up to £9,000 per year for a degree in Scotland while every other “EU citizen” gets free university education largely thanks to EU laws.

If you have the choice of paying £9,000 a year for 3 years for a degree in England (thanks to tuition fees imposed on England by MPs elected in Scotland) or £9,000 a year for 4 years for the same degree with an extra year of expenses and you have to live in a hostile country where half the population hates you because of where you were born, which would you choose?

With a bit of luck Scottish universities will start running out of money soon now they’ve bitten the hand that feeds them because according to the Scottish Education Secretary an influx of Scottish students studying in English universities would bankrupt the country as the Scottish government pays the tuition fees of Scots in English universities as well.

Good luck to the English students challenging this racial discrimination in the courts.

Cleggy says discrimination against English students is right

Nick Clegg has told the Daily Telegraph that it is right English students should have to pay up to £9k per year to go to university while Scottish students should study for free.

He said that under devolution it is right that there should be differences in the two nations and he’s absolutely right – the whole point of devolution is that we have different needs and priorities but the problem is that we don’t have devolution, Scotland does. The master of hypocrisy said:

There’s no point in having devolution if you don’t have devolved and different policy outcomes and that’s precisely what we have in higher education.

You either believe in the Scottish nation, as I do, and that you have Scottish solutions to Scottish issues or you don’t.

We believe that it is quite right, as longstanding supporters of proper devolution and indeed further devolution, that you have different solutions in different parts of the country.

Interesting choice of words from Cleggover – he believes in the Scottish nation and Scottish solutions to Scottish issues but he believes in the break-up of the English nation and British solutions for English issues.

I’ve sent the following email to his office:

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph you are quoted as saying “You either believe in the Scottish nation, as I do, and that you have Scottish solutions to Scottish issues or you don’t”.

Do you believe in the English nation? Why do you campaign for the break-up of England into regions we don’t want?

Why do you believe that you should have Scottish solutions to Scottish issues but British solutions to English issues? Why do you believe that British MPs elected in Scotland, Wales & NI should vote for increased tuition fees in England but tuition fees in Scotland should be decided by members of the Scottish Parliament?

7 out of 10 people want to either stop MPs not elected in England from meddling in English affairs or a devolved English Parliament. Why do you believe they shouldn’t have what they want but the Scots, Welsh & Northern Irish should have just that? It seems to me the Liberal Democrats should be renamed the Illiberal Hypocrites because you are neither liberal nor democrats.

Click here to contact Cleggy.

GPs told to double prescription costs in England

According to the BBC, GPs in England are being put under pressure by PCTs to half the amount of medication they are prescribing patients to bring in more income from prescription charges.

Currently you can get up to 2 months’ worth of medication on one prescription but PCTs have been telling GPs to cut that to one month, doubling the cost of repeat prescriptions at a time when they have just gone up to £7.40 per item in England.

Prescription charges have been free in Wales and Northern Ireland for a while and became free in Scotland this year on April Fool’s Day – the same day the British Department of Health put the price up to £7.40 in England.  The British Department of Health says that it can’t afford the £450m cost of providing free prescriptions in England but the British government still manages to find £20bn per year of English money to subsidise free prescriptions and other benefits in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and £4bn to bail out Portugal.

The Brits are taking the piss once again, where are the riots on the streets over this sickness tax?

Free prescriptions for Scots and increases for England on April Fool’s Day

On the 1st of April, the British Department of English Health is putting prescriptions charges up to £7.40 per item.

On the 1st of April, the Scottish government is abolishing prescription charges.

The Welsh and Northern Irish already get free prescriptions so from April Fool’s Day, the English will be the only people in the UK who have to pay for prescriptions.  Not only will we pay for our own prescriptions, but we’re also paying for the free prescriptions the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish get by way of the £20bn a year Barnett bribe.

According to the British Department of English Health, it would cost £450m to give free prescriptions to English people and after giving all our money away to the Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish and the EU we apparently can’t afford it.  Two and a half days of EU membership fees would cover the cost of free prescriptions in England.  I know what I’d rather the money was spent on and it isn’t Greek sewers, Albanian roads, French farmers and Spanish fishermen.

This is a local cafe for local people

Our poor precious MPs aren’t very happy MPs Onlythat the number of seats reserved for them and their guests in the Strangers Cafe in the House of Commons has been reduced so that the peasants don’t have to wait so long while the MP’s reserved seating area sits half empty.

Fifteen MPs have signed a motion complaining that:

[there is] often insufficient capacity for hon Members and their guests

… and …

that no consultation of Honourable Members took place prior to the decision

I rather think that the MPs in question may have answered their own complaint.  There is sufficient capacity for honourable members in the back of my car and I have no doubt the parliamentary authorities would have debated the decision with honourable members were they able to find some that hadn’t done the honourable thing and resigned.

Go fuck yourself Cameron

Ann Widdecombe has publicly spoken out against David Camoron‘s “A” list selection procedure for Tory PPC’s.

The “A” list system discriminates against white male candidates in favour of ethnic and female candidates in a deliberate attempt to artifically “balance” the sexual and ethnic make-up of the British government by placing ethnic and female candidates in safe seats to guarantee a disproportionately high number of ethnic and female MPs.

The Tories have already been told by the Electoral Commission that the all-female lists they used during the 2005 general election were illegal under discrimination laws.  Hopefully some sensible Tory candidates make complaints about the “A” list discrimination and get them declared illegal before David Camoron manages to rig the election result.

Anti-English, pro-EU, institutional racist and sexist … why would anyone vote for that?

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Harman wants companies to discriminate

Straight from the horses mouth, Harriet Harman wants companies to practice discrimination when considering similar applications for jobs:

They might think we don’t want an all male team.

We’ve got a new post coming up, we’ve got equally qualified men and women going for it, we are going to pick the woman because we want to have a more balanced top team.

Under a new law that she wants to bring in, companies will be banned from any form of age discrimination but will be allowed and encouraged to take into account sex and colour when considering two people with similar qualifications for a job to ensure that they have a “balanced” workforce.

Once again, the young white Englishman is going to be discriminated against to meet arbitrary quotas.  Already the police, fire service, local authorities and British government departments run racist recruitment campaigns that ban white English men from applying but now they are going to extend that same racial and sexual discrimination to the private sector.

Is it any wonder so many people are joining the fucking BNP?  It’s the same hand-wrinnging liberals that complain about the BNP that are causing the problem in the first place.

We have got to get rid of this illiberal, racist fucking scum.

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Bus Pass Discrimination

On April 1st a new scheme came into force to allow pensioners to have fee off-peak travel around England.

Previously they were entitled to only off-peak travel within their local authority.

Pensioners in Scotland and Wales have been entitled to free public transport at any time throughout their own country for several years and in Northern Ireland they are entitled to free transport throughout Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

English pensioners still don’t have the same rights that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish pensioners have because there is no English government for English people.

Free public transport is only one area where English pensioners are disadvantaged compared to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish (free central heating, free elderly care, for example) but it’s one that has the potential to make a real difference to their lives, particularly those with mobility problems.
The only way English pensioners are going to get the same treatment as Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish pensioners is with an English Parliament spending English taxes on people in England.

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